Privacy Policy

The Short Version

This site has no analytics and no ad pixels. The only cookies it sets are the two that keep you signed in, and only if you sign in. The personal information it collects is what you type into its forms: a reservation, a contact enquiry, the travel-advisor partner form, your account settings, or the details a travel advisor gives us to plan a client's trip. All of it goes to us, so we can confirm your spot, plan a safe course or adventure, and register your certification with FII.

What We Collect

When you reserve a spot: Your full name, email, phone number, date of birth, the course date you want, anything you choose to tell us in the note, how you heard about us, and, if one of our Google ads brought you here, the code Google added to its link, so we know the ad worked. If you are 16 or 17, the name, email, and phone number of your parent or guardian.

When you send an enquiry: Your name, email, and phone number, your message, and whether you are a traveler, a travel advisor, or something else.

When we plan an adventure: What you share with us by phone, email, or through your travel advisor to plan it well and safely, such as who is coming and their ages, your travel dates, dietary needs, swimming experience, and the health information in the release and medical forms.

When you send the travel-advisor partner form: Your name, email, phone, and agency, your photo, job title, and mailing address if you add them, plus your answers: your affiliations, years advising, website and social profiles, your clients' typical spend and interests, and how you would like to be reached.

When you sign in: The date and count of your sign-ins. In your account settings, if you choose to fill them in: your photo, phone, company, job title, and mailing address.

When a travel advisor plans a vacation for you: The name they put on the page and whatever they write in their notes about your trip. Your advisor gives us this, not you, and they are responsible for having your agreement to share it. The page we build sits at a long, unguessable web address, is listed nowhere, and is closed to search engines, but anyone your advisor sends the link to can open it.

With any form you send: The time you sent it, your computer's internet address, and the name and version of your browser. We keep these alongside your message to spot abuse and to know when you agreed to our terms.

Why

To confirm your spot and arrange payment, to plan a safe course (your age matters for the FII paperwork and for who needs a guardian), to register your certification with Freediving Instructors International when you pass, to answer your enquiry, plan your adventure, and book the partners it needs, to review a travel advisor's partner form and stay in touch with our partners, and to give an advisor the tools to plan and present a trip to their client.

Where It Lives

Everything above is stored in one private database on Amazon Web Services in the United States, encrypted at rest.

We keep records rather than erase them. When something ends, a reservation cancelled or a vacation archived, we mark it closed and keep the record. FII requires instructors to keep student records for at least seven years, and our books, taxes, and insurance need the rest. Each time you send the travel-advisor partner form we keep that version beside the new one, so we can see what changed. If you want something deleted, ask us: see Your Choices below.

A profile photo you upload is stored as a file on the site's public hosting at an unguessable address. Anyone with the exact link can view it, and it appears beside your name in the site's header while you are signed in.

Who Sees It

Our team. Freediving Instructors International (FII): every student is registered with FII, which keeps its own record of you and your certification under its own privacy policy, and emails you directly about its release, medical statement, and certification. Amazon Web Services, which hosts the site and the database and sends email on our behalf. Stripe, which takes course payments: you pay on Stripe's own secure page, under Stripe's privacy policy, and your card number never reaches us (we see your name, email, the amount, and the card's last four digits). The boat captains, chefs, and other partners who make your adventure happen, and only what they need to do it (a chef hears about your allergies, a captain gets names and headcount). If you tell us you are working with a travel advisor, we may coordinate with them about your trip. Nobody else. We never sell your information and never share it for marketing.

A vacation page an advisor publishes for a client, and the PDF of it, sit at long unguessable web addresses that anyone holding the link can open.

Email

The site sends transactional email only: our notification when you reserve, enquire, or send the partner form, and the sign-in links and invitations you or we request. It comes from the site's own address, website@costafreediving.com, and replies come straight to us at costa@costafreediving.com. There is no newsletter list. Mail you send to any @costafreediving.com address is kept in a private archive on Amazon Web Services and forwarded to our team, and that archive is kept rather than cleared out.

Cookies And Your Browser

No analytics, no advertising pixels, no beacons. Nothing here reports your visit to anybody.

Signing in sets two cookies, and only then. One holds the signature of your session, and your browser will not let any script read it. The other holds your name, email, photo, company, and which pages you may open, so the site can greet you and show you the right menu. Both last 60 days, both clear when you sign out, and a visitor who never signs in gets neither. They are set for costafreediving.com, so they work on our test site too.

Your browser also keeps a few things for you alone: your light or dark choice, a form you started and have not sent, that code from one of our Google ads for 90 days, and the quote or vacation you are working on if you use our advisor tools. None of it goes anywhere until you send the form it belongs to, and clearing your browser data clears it.

One page, our private dive guide, asks the US Geological Survey for live river flow while you read it, so their servers see that request.

For Travel Advisors

When you publish a vacation for a client, the page carries your photo, name, job title, and agency, and your phone or email only if you switch them on. It carries no price and no link back to us but a small mark at the foot.

You can see how many times your page has been opened and when it was last opened. That is all there is: we do not record who opened it, where they were, or what browser they used. Your own visits and ours are left out wherever we can tell.

The details you type about a client are yours to have the right to share. We store them, we never contact your client ourselves, and we never sell or market to them.

Your Choices

Ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, a correction, or deletion, and we will take care of it, normally within a month. Email us. Some of it we may have to keep: the FII record above, and whatever our books, taxes, and insurance require. You can also tell us to stop using your details to reach you, and we will.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for advertising. We never have.

These are rights the law gives people in Europe, the United Kingdom, and California. We extend the same ones to everybody, wherever you live. If you are in Europe or the UK and we cannot put something right, you may complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

The site's forms are not meant for anyone under 16. Students who are 12 to 15 join FII's Junior Freediver course by request, and younger guests can join a family adventure. For anyone under 16, we collect what we need only from their parent or guardian.

Changes To This Policy

We will update this page as the business grows, and the date at the top will change when we do. When a change matters, we will tell the people it affects.

Contact

Questions? costa@costafreediving.com or (212) 602-1401. See also the terms of service.